The 21st century guide to platform trolling: Apple edition

Are you a Windows user seeking ammo with which to rebut your Apple-loving …

Though the glory days of platform contention may be behind us, there is plenty about today's computing landscape that's... sub-optimal, shall we say. Yesterday we looked at some of the many problems with the world of Windows: things that make the computing experience worse than it should be.

Windows' number one competitor is, of course, Mac OS X (sorry penguins, maybe 2011 will be the year of Linux on the desktop), and Mac OS X is free of many of the problems that plague Windows. Unfortunately, the platform has plenty of problems of its own. Today, we're going to take a look at them.

You can have your turtleneck in any color you want, as long as it's black

One of the things that sets Mac OS X apart from Windows is the hardware it runs on. Sure, Macs are PCs these days, but if that PC isn't Apple-branded, you're not allowed to run Mac OS X on it, per the terms of the EULA. And while there are a few brave souls out there sticking it to The Man with their Hackintoshes, for normal people the EULA rules: they run Mac OS X on Apple hardware.

Now, there's nothing wrong with Apple hardware per se. The machines are generally well-designed and attractive. But the hardware range is oh-so limited. Want a 12" ultraportable, a spiritual successor to the widely-loved 12" PowerBook G4? Too bad. Lenovo has 'em. Dell has 'em. Toshiba has 'em. Apple? Sorry, but no. Oh, sure, there's the MacBook Air, which is certainly thin and light. But a 12" screen would make it small, too, and size matters. Small is beautiful! There are currently rumors doing the rounds that the MacBook Air will shortly be updated to have a smaller, sub-12" screen, so the 12" ultraportable will be back—but this in turn is likely to leave the position the current MacBook Air fills vacant.

It's the same story if you want a netbook. Steve Jobs claims that Apple can't do a good netbook—by which he means a high-margin netbook, as the idea that Apple's engineers and designers couldn't actually produce a good netbook is fanciful nonsense—so you're not going to get one. You'll have to make do with an iPad, as if an iPad were even half as capable as a MacBook.

If you just want a basic desktop—something reasonably fast (so built with desktop parts, unlike the low-end laptop-in-a-box that is the Mac Mini), something that doesn't force you to buy a whole new monitor just because it's gotten a bit old—you're out of luck. You can get a high-end tower that's overkill for any normal person in the form of a Mac Pro, but if you just want, well, a regular PC, no joy. There is no xMac.

Affordable, expandable, and fast: pick any two

It's not that I think Apple should aim to fill every possible niche. Companies like Dell try that, and it's horrible. They have a hojillion different products, all with minor variations, and the result is a confusing mess. A streamlined product line-up is a good thing, overall. But you can have too much of a good thing, and the gaps that Apple leaves in its product line-up are frustrating. The problem here isn't that iMacs, for example, don't have nice screens in them; they really do, they're very nice screens. But I already have a nice screen on my office PC and don't really want (or need) to buy another one.

And even when you want a machine that aligns with Apple's offerings, the selections are limited. The most enduring and annoying omissions are in video cards. Even on a high-end Mac Pro, the 12-core model whose prices start at $5,000, you can't (yet) get any NVIDIA cards preinstalled. At the time of writing, there's one NVIDIA card listed as compatible with current Mac Pros, available as an after-market upgrade. And it costs $1,800. Want one of NVIDIA's high-performance, mid-range cards, a GeForce GTX 460, say? Too bad, you can't have one.

Again, I don't think the company should have a hundred thousand different options like the PC manufacturers do, and I can understand wanting to limit the options to components that are, well, good. But it should have enough choice, and at the moment, the company falls a long way short of that.

It wouldn't be so bad if the claims made of its systems were suitably modest. But the company says that the iMac's GPU is good enough for gaming. Sorry, dudes, but no. A Radeon HD 5650 or 5750 isn't going to provide an enjoyable gaming experience on the otherwise glorious 27" 2560×1440 screen. Which is too bad.

About that 3D performance...

Of course, I'm probably not going to be gaming in Mac OS X anyway, because the 3D performance is sohorrible. As important as OpenGL is to Mac OS X—and it is important, because it's used for important tasks like compositing the desktop—it ain't quick.

It's not kept up-to-date, either. On Windows, you get all the latest OpenGL bells and whistles, including the hefty OpenGL 4 update, that gave OpenGL feature parity with Direct3D 11. Modern video hardware has a wealth of desirable new capabilities, but software on the Mac has no (standard) way of using them.

In Mac OS X? You don't even get 100 percent conformance with OpenGL 3.0. Which dates back to 2008. Because Mac OS X is unloved.

For the past six months, I have a hard time reading the rantings of Apple Haters. They are never right about anything when it comes to Apple. Every time they say Apple is going to fail with a product, it becomes a major hit and yet, the Apple Haters continue in their tired quest to discourage people on the internet from buying Apple products.

Hey, Apple Haters, if you haven't noticed, no one is listening to you! Maybe you should go and troll something else. I heard Justin Bieber is coming to town.

1. As I read this article, I was loading a directory of 12 tracks into itunes. By the time I had finished reading this article it was only 3 tracks in... and I can't even access the music. I hate itunes so badly, I'm pretty sure that if someone makes an alternative (i.e Media Monkey for Mac) it would sell like hot cakes. Also, what's up with the vertical traffic lights on the top left, while the rest of apple apps have it arranged horizontally. Did the iTunes team decide to set the new UI standards for Mac?

1a.The other thing that really annoys me is when you close the window with the red x at the top right, you'd think that this would close the program. But no it doesn't. Why?

2.Another annoying aspect of OS X, maybe there's a solution to this somewhere, every time I launch certain apps the dmg is mounted. After a while I need to manually un-mount the dmg files. Annoying.

3. The variety of applications on a mac is very limited..very limited... none. When I say variety I'm talking about quality variety. The limited array of applications has definitely has to be one worst aspects of OS X.

2.Another annoying aspect of OS X, maybe there's a solution to this somewhere, every time I launch certain apps the dmg is mounted. After a while I need to manually un-mount the dmg files. Annoying.

Sounds like you aren't copying apps from a disk image into the Applications directory. If you launch an app from a disk image and then keep the icon in the Dock, the disk image will need to be re-mounted when you try to launch the app.

The fix is to copy the app to the /Applications directory on your hard disk. It's generally not recommended to run apps from disk images.

Ifndefx wrote:

3. The variety of applications on a mac is very limited..very limited... none. When I say variety I'm talking about quality variety. The limited array of applications has definitely has to be one worst aspects of OS X.

Such as? The only thing I really miss from Windows is a decent MySQL DB client. I've tried all the Mac OS X ones and they're all crap...

I generally find the quality of Mac apps somewhat better than Windows equivalents.

ifndefx - #2 is because you have taken an .app out of a .dmg and placed it on your bar without installing the app in the /Applications folder. Simply trash the .app on your bar (drag it off into the desktop), and open the .dmg file, have it mount and drag the application into the /Applications folder. Then from there drag it to your bar. This isn't annoying its just how you install an application properly.

#1. Both you and the author need to learn how to use iTunes, neither of your complaints are really all that valid if you know how to use the program.

Peter Bright shouldn't write about network mounts when his limited experience is automounting from his Windows Domain without specifying options for retries. OSX has no problem holding a NFS or SMB share across disconnects, you simply have to pass it the correct options to do so.

With Apple/Mac trollers, it seems that they attack the people that use them more than the actual OS or hardware. Sure, to some extent the "their hardware is way overpriced" is a consistant rant, but more often than not, the haters go after the "sheeple" or "fanbois" that buy Apple products.

But here's someone that is kind of trolling, or may have legit issues. A sure sign of a clever troll is NOT to be obvious, but be subtle as this guy is:

Ifndefx wrote:

1. As I read this article, I was loading a directory of 12 tracks into itunes. By the time I had finished reading this article it was only 3 tracks in... and I can't even access the music. I hate itunes so badly, I'm pretty sure that if someone makes an alternative (i.e Media Monkey for Mac) it would sell like hot cakes. Also, what's up with the vertical traffic lights on the top left, while the rest of apple apps have it arranged horizontally. Did the iTunes team decide to set the new UI standards for Mac?

1a.The other thing that really annoys me is when you close the window with the red x at the top right, you'd think that this would close the program. But no it doesn't. Why?

2.Another annoying aspect of OS X, maybe there's a solution to this somewhere, every time I launch certain apps the dmg is mounted. After a while I need to manually un-mount the dmg files. Annoying.

3. The variety of applications on a mac is very limited..very limited... none. When I say variety I'm talking about quality variety. The limited array of applications has definitely has to be one worst aspects of OS X.

4. Finder sux... enough said.

Excellent! We'll see how many you suck into your web with this. Very well played...except for #4, which is a little too obvious.

It seems Peter Bright got his facts a bit confused. As opposed to most other things in Apple, Mac OS X releases are NOT suddenly just released. In fact we usually start hearing about it at least a year in advance at some event or another. So spending time telling us it shouldn't be a big secret is somewhat pointless and that Windows 7 had a public beta, is a bit pointless.

I wonder why this was written a day before Apple unveils how the Mac-OS X Platform will develop. Maybe tomorrows Apple-Event will cause many of the arguments stated here to be moot?

Maybe is exactly right and prophesied Apple's course concerning Mac-OS X and the ongoing negligence in favor of iOS correctly. It would be interesting to see, if there are going to be major improvements concerning Apple's traditional market.

On the other hand:I wonder if tomorrow or the day after tomorrow Peter will post a follow-article on how Mac-OS X is being taken more seriously and a lot of development still being done. I could well imagine and "it is being rumored" (case in point "secrecy"!), that some benefits from the iOS development will eventually come to bear on Mac-OS X, i.e. not only always the other way around.Maybe the two operating systems will be integrated some time in the future, like NT and 95 became XP?

Either way a follow up would be necessary, it seems.

As to a mac not seeing network shares in Windows-Networks.Maybe I didn't understand this correctly, but I always see every machine in my workplace's Windows and Linux network when I log into the network. They will just appear in the finder...

Bottom line is that for as long Apple has Steve Jobs at the helm, nothing is going to change. He's a perfectionist, so even if it doesnt work properly as long it applies to HIM its okay. Don't expect change unless he's gone people (not that I can realy complain about my Apple stuff at the moment )

2.Another annoying aspect of OS X, maybe there's a solution to this somewhere, every time I launch certain apps the dmg is mounted. After a while I need to manually un-mount the dmg files. Annoying.

I so hope this is a joke.

Nice enough article though. My personal summation of what I hate about the platform I use all the time is part disgust at being beholden to all the secrecy and "you'll get this and like it, bitches" Apple attitude and part "wow, there are so many things here that could be great, but aren't".

FWIW, an iMac, MBP and a hackintosh for TV viewing.

Peter inspired me to install a pirated Win7 into VMWare last night. That was a very interesting experience. It basically looked like they'd stolen equally from OS-X (the dock-like thing, widgets, even a beachball-like wait cursor) and KDE/Gnome awfulness. I don't get the "webpage-like" look to everything, but hey... Overall though it's not a total turd, and that's nice to see.

It definitely takes guts to say that Apple isn't sufficiently focused on the Mac one day prior to the "Back to the Mac" event. If the announcements tomorrow are lame, then the argument will seem insightful. If the announcements are impressive, then the argument might seem silly.

My own take is that Apple is suffering not from a lack of "caring" about the Mac. They are suffering from the difficulty of scaling up staff at the same rate as their sales. Apple has grown tremendously over the last 10 years. It's physically impossible to grow talented OSX programmers/designers as quickly as Apple has grown sales and products. Once Apple is able to staff up to the point that they can deploy a first string team for iOS development and a first string team for Mac development, then this worry about how much Apple "cares" about the Mac will disappear. Ironically the proliferation of iOS devices probably helps -- there's a much larger pool of people who know how to use Apple's development tools today than there was 3 years ago, which means a larger pool of people to hire to work on the Mac.

I'm frankly disappointed with the article. I'm an Apple user and I was expecting it to be focused on OS X, just like the previous article was focused on Windows. No word on lame application installs (it's easy, yeah, but "normal" users just don't 'get' mounted ISO images), limited Finder and the lack of options when displaying a search result, etc, etc.

It definitely takes guts to say that Apple isn't sufficiently focused on the Mac one day prior to the "Back to the Mac" event. If the announcements tomorrow are lame, then the argument will seem insightful. If the announcements are impressive, then the argument might seem silly.

Totally OT, but I'd just like to personally curse you for starting that thread in the Battlefront. I feel so incredibly dirty for having read that whole thing. I came away feeling so much worse about humanity in general. Really, thanks much. And way classy to start that and then exit the thread. Great show, awesome job.

Just a comment about your networking dilemma with OS X, Peter: when I had some students working with automounted Open Directory shares which were hosting the student's home folders, I pushed the reset button on the iMac (G3) acting as the directory server. Right while a student was playing music from iTunes from the networked file server.

Rather than do anything or react or crash, iTunes would just sit there and act unresponsive. And as soon as the file server was back up, iTunes started playing again as if nothing had happened. Not even OS X reacted to the idea that the file server that the student's Home folder was in couldn't be accessed.

I think that shows they've at least made the corporate networking side of things a little more reliable. In some way.

1. As I read this article, I was loading a directory of 12 tracks into itunes. By the time I had finished reading this article it was only 3 tracks in... and I can't even access the music. I hate itunes so badly, I'm pretty sure that if someone makes an alternative (i.e Media Monkey for Mac) it would sell like hot cakes.

There are alternatives. But I can't say I have every seriously considered using one. Not sure why your import is so slow tho. I am guessing a really busy hard disk.

Ifndefx wrote:

Also, what's up with the vertical traffic lights on the top left, while the rest of apple apps have it arranged horizontally. Did the iTunes team decide to set the new UI standards for Mac?

Indeed they do. The metal skin for apps also came out of iTunes. But you are right. It is really bad for UI consistency, that has always supposed to be a big deal on Mac OS. Seems it is a dirty hack to gain a little extra space in the minimized iTunes window.

Ifndefx wrote:

1a.The other thing that really annoys me is when you close the window with the red x at the top right, you'd think that this would close the program. But no it doesn't. Why?

Generally applications are not quit by closing their windows on Mac OS (this goes back to before the 'X' days). I believe idea is that with many applications you do not want to quit and start them all the time. On Windows that was historically solved by having a main window that everything else went into so you could have no documents open and still have the application running.

More recently some applications on Mac OS X will quit when their window is closed. I think that behavior is supposed to be expected from applications that have only one window and where it makes no sense to keep it running. And it should use the 'metal look' skin... I think it is something like that the human interface guidelines say. iTunes is a border-case I suppose where they decided it would not make sense to quit it when you close the main window.

Sounds like you aren't copying apps from a disk image into the Applications directory. If you launch an app from a disk image and then keep the icon in the Dock, the disk image will need to be re-mounted when you try to launch the app.

The fix is to copy the app to the /Applications directory on your hard disk. It's generally not recommended to run apps from disk images.

Hi, thanks I'll give that a shot, although I was sure that I had copied these to the application folder.

@oddmyth, I'm not really sure how the steps to add a directory can be done in other ways other than dragging and dropping.

@sporkme, not a joke. This is the experience that I have had on it. Regardless, this is something that looks not so polished with a mac, from an end user experience this is a little poor.

1a.The other thing that really annoys me is when you close the window with the red x at the top right, you'd think that this would close the program. But no it doesn't. Why?

Because OS X is not Windows? It's just a different way to approach a task. Office on Windows used to infuriate me when it would quite after I closed an office document and wanted to start on a new one without relaunching the application - I adjusted and moved on.

Granted, Apple isn't consistent with this, but in general for the Mac, closing the last window of an application doesn't mean you want to quit the application.

For the past six months, I have a hard time reading the rantings of Apple Haters. They are never right about anything when it comes to Apple. Every time they say Apple is going to fail with a product, it becomes a major hit and yet, the Apple Haters continue in their tired quest to discourage people on the internet from buying Apple products.

Hey, Apple Haters, if you haven't noticed, no one is listening to you! Maybe you should go and troll something else. I heard Justin Bieber is coming to town.

im off to play some Crysis and Metro 2033 at the highest settings on my Dual 480GTX's how about you?

He fails to mention that media from Xbox 360 and Zune were not compatible until a year ago. That is the reason I switched to Apple. I was tired of buying solutions that 1/2 worked.

The funny thing about the network. My Mac never drops the network and connecting to a wireless network is almost instant. On my Windows 7 computer at work it sits with little spinning circle waiting to connect.

I'm frankly disappointed with the article. I'm an Apple user and I was expecting it to be focused on OS X, just like the previous article was focused on Windows. No word on lame application installs (it's easy, yeah, but "normal" users just don't 'get' mounted ISO images), limited Finder and the lack of options when displaying a search result, etc, etc.

Maybe it's because there is nothing to new to say about any new version of OSX?

Not so much an OS issue, as a hardware issue (it's an overall user experience issue)

...but why can't Apple pick a damn connector style and stick to it. Every time they make a new laptop (my old company used them) you'd have to have a new connector. We had drawers of nothing but damn adaptors.

I'm surprised there was no mention of OSX's filesystem, HFS. I suppose it is entirely possible that HFS only annoys a tiny fraction of the userbase, but as a software developer often working on projects with a lot of small files, it's horrendously slow. Oh, if only I could use ext4 or zfs or something similar. On the other hand, I am not familiar enough with NTFS to know how it stacks up against its Windows counterpart.

With Apple/Mac trollers, it seems that they attack the people that use them more than the actual OS or hardware. Sure, to some extent the "their hardware is way overpriced" is a consistant rant, but more often than not, the haters go after the "sheeple" or "fanbois" that buy Apple products.

Yet the article is one long attack on Apple for not caring about its users, and if anything tries to defend said users.

andre_elias wrote:

I'm frankly disappointed with the article. I'm an Apple user and I was expecting it to be focused on OS X, just like the previous article was focused on Windows. No word on lame application installs (it's easy, yeah, but "normal" users just don't 'get' mounted ISO images), limited Finder and the lack of options when displaying a search result, etc, etc.

As an Apple user (who is admittedly migrating away from the platform as we speak), I think he nailed a lot of the real issues with the platform. Some important technical shortcomings were brought up, and the horrendous steering of the platform, which is arguably the greatest threat to mac users, was described at length. Installing apps by dragging them to a folder is a valid design decision that requires a minimum of teaching to understand, killing off 64-bit Carbon while perhaps necesary for the company hurt users, developers and arguably the platform - and there is nothing we can do about it.The combination of lousy hardware support and horrible 3D performance is - when it comes to the overall platform, much more important than [insert pet peevee with the Finder], and anyone who claims the advent of iOS gadgets hasn't sidetracked the mac is obviously not looking.

Personally, I think techsupport and hardware quality is the number one problem with the platform (and what made me leave it), but that has more to do with the company doing tech support in Denmark and a specific design flaw on some of the macbooks, than with the health of the platform in general.

A couple things the author had a problem with that I don't understand...

I have two Macs in my house. One is sharing a FW drive. That shared drive is mounted in the Dock of my MacBook Pro. I can go 300 miles from home, turn on my MBP, and the shared drive is still there, in the dock. If I try to access it, it turns into a question mark. It doesn't just "disappear" as the author states. When I get home, back on my own network and try to access the shared drive, the question mark turns back into the drive and it's contents pop up. I've never had a shared volume to up and vanish on me, so this makes no sense to me.

Another thing that makes no sense is the authors problems with viewing other Windows PC's on a local network. I live in a mixed household. 2 Macs and 6 PC's, some XP, some Vista, some 7. All of them have shared folders on them, and I am able to see all of them, without any trouble or head scratching. I click on Network in the Finder, and there they are. So again, I don't get the issue. It's always "just worked" for me, so what is the author doing that it doesn't "just work" for him?

Lastly, in regards to secrecy, I won't deny that Apple loves the surprise factor. But with Leopard and especially Snow Leopard, the world was made well of aware of them LONG before they were released, so it was certainly no surprise. Speaking of which, it's obvious that Apple will be previewing 10.7 tomorrow. So again, it's actual release, most likely a year or more away, won't be much of a surprise.

As a loyal Mac user for over 15 years...iTunes has become a monstrous abomination. What exactly was the point of streamlining all the OS code for 10.6 only to plonk a ginormous mess of non-multi-threading-yet-pseudo-social-networking Carbon gunk on top of it. As the article pointed out, as a Mac user, you have no choice, iTunes bestrides your day-to-day activities like an incontinent colossus. Since migrating my 120GB library to a Synology NAS (capable of 50 MB/s), I've never seen so many spinning beach-balls. The "much-vaunted" consolidate library function ran for about an hour before giving up. Examining it's handiwork, I find random weirdness like a folder of Beethoven symphonies inside a folder of Joy Division. My library has always hitherto been "kept organised" by iTunes. This is supposed to be a flagship product, a major money making portal, from one of the world's pre-eminent technology companies. Yet it's risible. I can only hope Kim Jong-Un is planning to compile a new version to celebrate his accession. It could not be any worse if he did.

The OS in general is definitely showing signs of wear and tear, fewer things "just work" and more inconsistencies are creeping in. Having turned quite a few people onto Macs over the years, I am getting fed up of making excuses for basic issues which verge on the eccentric. Example: I copy a folder from drive A to drive B, yet when I try to copy the same folder from drive B to drive C, it fails with a "you do not have permission to read/write all of the enclosed items". At which point in the last 10 seconds did something change? The drives are all set to "ignore ownership" to boot, which they clearly don't.

I pay the Apple premium to avoid being annoyed, but it seems to be not such good value as it once was...

For the past six months, I have a hard time reading the rantings of Apple Haters. They are never right about anything when it comes to Apple. Every time they say Apple is going to fail with a product, it becomes a major hit and yet, the Apple Haters continue in their tired quest to discourage people on the internet from buying Apple products.

Hey, Apple Haters, if you haven't noticed, no one is listening to you! Maybe you should go and troll something else. I heard Justin Bieber is coming to town.

im off to play some Crysis and Metro 2033 at the highest settings on my Dual 480GTX's how about you?

I'm off to play Left4Dead2, World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2 and Team Fortress 2 with the year old ATI Radeon 4850 video card on my iMac.